Sweet Relief.

"The summer is WAY slower," they said. "The summer will be so much easier and you'll have so much more time!"

Yeah, not my experience thus far in my career. In fact, the summer has been crazier than any other time of year, this spring being the exception. This spring has just been...I don't even know how to describe it, but I'm sure that any gray hair that I've gained has been due to the shenanigans of this spring.

I have also noticed that working on a publication makes everything more stressful. Through teaching and working, it has consistently been in the back of my mind. Sometimes in the front of my mind, though, because my mentor emails me every two weeks or so with patient admonition to set deadlines or get working. He's possibly the most patient person I know, because he's been cajoling me about it for literally over a year and I've been digging my heels in for what looks like absolutely no reason at this point. I kept waiting for things to calm down and then they never did.

What I have to do is accept the chaos. There is always going to be something going on. Things are always going to be hectic. Things are always going to be a mess. I'm always going to have a million case notes or quarterlies that are overdue or other things that demand my attention, professionally or personally. What that means is that I have to be patient with myself and crowbar it in when I can.

I legitimately thought about giving up the ghost on making an article from my thesis about six months ago. I just thought it was never going to happen, and I had accepted it and was ready to move on with my life. My mentor, as he is known to do with me, was a little stern and said, "Ryan, this research is groundbreaking. You HAVE TO do something with it. I'm not going to let you let it just sit there unpublished."

This felt remarkably similar to the "you have to have a more open mind about the population you want to treat" when he asked me if I wanted to do my internship with children and families and I said no. Like, he offered this spot for me, in the current organization and department in which I am working and about to become a supervisor, and I said no. And then about day two of my internship I realized that this was the population with which I wanted to work. Because of course that's how it happens.

Anyway, because these two situations felt so similar and the first conversation had such a good outcome, I have to trust that it's the right decision to move forward. My data will not stay current for a whole lot longer, and I'm at the prime time to get working on it.

So that's what is happening. I just submitted my intro and literature review sections, about which I have been ruminating since early March and wrote in about 5 cumulative hours. Next up is the Methods and Results section, which I can just copy and paste straight from my thesis.

Even though this is just a working copy, I feel like I want to throw up a
little bit every time I highlight or underline or write in it.

I'm SO RELIEVED about submitting these two sections because I had to rewrite them. Neither look at all like what my first two sections of my thesis look like. The reason for this is that I was told when I met with the editor of the publication in which I'm trying to publish (AND YEAH THINGS LIKE THAT HAPPEN AND I ALMOST BARFED ON THIS MAN'S SHOES I WAS SO EXCITED) that any references can't be more than five years old, or there has to be justification for using them. Like five, and that's being charitable, of the references in my thesis' lit review and introduction fit that criteria. So, shit. I had to find almost all new ones. But, I was able to get it together and get it submitted.

I learned two things from this experience:

1. I consistently stress about something to the point of paralysis, but when it gets right down to actually doing it, it takes me SO MUCH LESS time than I expect it to.

2. I need to be more patient with myself if I want to break this pattern. The key to that is going to be breaking these overwhelming parts into smaller bits.

THE SECOND I put that second point into practice, I was able to sit down and write. And write. And write. The other overwhelming thing that I was trying to overcome was the idea that my lit review in my thesis is like....60 pages? or so? Somewhere around there. It's at least a third of my entire thesis, which is 154 pages. As soon as I was able to get myself out of the frame of mind that I was just trying to condense my lit review down to an acceptable number of pages and that I would basically have to start from scratch, I was able to get to that second point, and not a moment before.

Anywho, I'm pretty damn stoked that I've gotten over the hump of actually sitting down and writing, and I'm really stoked to get going on the other sections. My goal is to submit by October, and the turnaround time for this particular journal is 3 months or so, so I'll know in early 2018 if I'll be published, if not sooner.

I've also gotten some loose ends tied up on the teaching end of things, and that's super relieving as well, because it means that I can finally get working on my syllabi. I was also driving home from work today and was really reflecting on how far I've come since I graduated undergrad, and it was almost comical. Seriously. What made me think about this? One of the courses I'm teaching has never been taught online, so I get to develop the course and teach it. I'm being paid extra (double, in fact) to develop the course for online implementation, and I laughed to myself HARD because I said to myself, "wow. I am being paid WAY OVERPAID to do this."

It got me thinking about when I worked in retail, and I was an interim manager for three months at this job. This particular company treated their employees like complete shit, and the people that worked there, myself included, were grateful for the opportunity at the time. I remember when I was offered this interim manager position, I was making pitifully little for the amount of work that I was putting into the job, and they offered me less than a thousand dollars spread over the course of three months for this temporary promotion. When they gave me a raise of $0.32 an hour, I thought it was perfectly fine, whereas the other people around me were like "UH, WHAT? THAT'S A SLAP IN THE FACE" when I told them. They were right. But, the thing is that I didn't believe I was worth more than that at the time. And that same place was where that "I'm being overpaid" feeling came from today when I got the emailed contract. While that was my automatic reaction, I was able to slap it back pretty quickly because the truth is that I am worth that much. My time is that valuable. Moreover, believing that my writing and my research is worthy of publication is where my writing process has to start.